The mad demon that infested Jerry’s brain made him wish he had Watchtower tracts to shove at the (probably) CIA man. Since he didn’t, he just said, “I’m off the Glomar Explorer. I’m here to get my real license and my credit card and my Social Security card back.”

  “Oh.” The man looked at him differently. “What’s your name—your real one?” Jerry told him. The guy checked a list, nodded to himself, and stepped aside. “C’mon in.” He turned. “We got another one, Vic.”

  For all Jerry could prove, Vic hadn’t moved from behind that table in the past two and a half months. He held out his hand. “Lemme have the documents we gave you back in June.” Jerry handed them over. Vic nodded to himself. “All here—good.” He looked up. “Have any trouble with ’em?”

  “No. I didn’t use them much, but they worked when I did.”

  “Good deal. That’s what we want to hear.” Vic opened his cash box with a key and flipped through envelopes till he found the one with Steinberg so neatly written on it. He took out Jerry’s authentic documents and gave them to him. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” Jerry checked to make sure they really were his before he put them in his wallet. Vic chuckled, for all the world as if the idea that the CIA might play identity games with him was the funniest thing in the world. Jerry stuck the wallet in his pocket and got the hell out of there.

  * * *

  When Anna let Jerry into her apartment, the King of Siam took one look at him, then bolted into the bedroom and hid under the bed. The beast hadn’t seen him for a couple of months, which made him a stranger and a presumptive cat-killer. If you looked at it the right way, it was funny. If you didn’t, the way the King of Siam saw Jerry was too much like the way Jerry saw the CIA. He did his damnedest to look at it right.

  He kissed Anna, which took his mind off other things while he was doing it. “Hey, babe,” he said. “How are you?”

  “I’m tired. I’m way better than I was yesterday, though—I’ll tell you that.”

  “I am sorry.” Jerry’d known he would keep paying for his late flight.

  “It wasn’t your fault.” From Anna, that was no small admission. She took back half of it a moment later: “No matter whose fault it was, I was a mumbling idiot at the office.”

  “It was screwed up all the way around. You want to go to Tres Hermanos and get something to eat?” Jerry said. They both liked the Mexican place on Prairie.

  “And a margarita. Maybe three margaritas, one for each brother,” Anna said. Jerry nodded. Tequila wasn’t his favorite, but Tres Hermanos served Dos Equis, too. He liked that fine.

  He had enough beer with dinner to be extra careful driving back to her place. Luckily, it wasn’t far. The King of Siam had come out when he realized he had the apartment to himself. Since Jerry walked in with Anna, the cat decided he might be an acceptable human being after all.

  Then his very own person shut him out of the bedroom while Jerry stayed in there with her. That was insulting enough to provoke a couple of irate meows. The cat must have realized the people weren’t paying any attention to him, because he shut up after that.

  “Oh, honey,” Jerry said. “Oh, honey. I missed you so much.”

  Anna poked him in the ribs with a sharp fingernail. “Did you miss me or did you just miss this? You could play with yourself in the shower and get this.”

  He’d done that. He was damned if he’d admit it. “It’s not the thing. It’s the company.” He meant most of that, anyway. And he did his very best to show her how sincere he was.

  His very best must have been good enough, because she didn’t hit him when he was ready to go again right away. He thought he got her where she was going once more, too, but he was less sure than he had been the first time. That made him decide against trying for round three just then.

  She got up, used the bathroom, and let in the King of Siam. Instead of hiding under the bed, the cat jumped up onto it. Jerry held out his hand. The Siamese sniffed it, then suffered himself to be scritched.

  “We need a new wedding date,” Anna said. Spoken by a woman wearing bare skin, the words were more inspiring than they might have been otherwise.

  Jerry nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

  “You have?” Anna sounded amazed.

  “Uh-huh. How does the twenty-fourth of November sound? It’s the Sunday before Thanksgiving. If I remember straight, the sections I’m gonna teach this quarter are on Thursday and Friday, so I wouldn’t even need anybody to cover for me while we go on our honeymoon.”

  For the first time since he’d come home, she kissed him instead of the other way around. He’d heard somewhere that the person who started a kiss was the one who really needed it. He didn’t know if he totally agreed with that, but it made more than a little sense.

  When they broke apart, she said, “I love you! That’s just the day I was looking at myself! I checked with the temple. They had it open, so I booked it.”

  “Good deal,” Jerry said. Anna was an even more half-assed Protestant than he was a Jew, so they’d planned a Jewish wedding. She made noises about converting. If she decided she wanted to go through with it, that was fine with him. If she didn’t, that was fine, too. He asked, “Can we still get Rabbi Burstein?”

  “I called him. He’s free,” Anna answered. People who looked at Jerry, with his long hair and his beard, sometimes said he looked like a rabbinical student. People who looked at Shlomo Burstein, with his bald head and his long, tangled gray beard, said he looked like a rabbi. Jerry wasn’t so sure about that. He thought Rabbi Burstein looked more like God’s older brother.

  “Then we’re good.” Jerry kissed her now. This one went on longer than the last one had. Down deep in his throat, he said, “I think we’re pretty good.” Stroking her was more fun than it was with the King of Siam.

  “I should have told the cook at Tres Hermanos to put saltpeter on your rice and beans,” she said darkly. He knew she’d got that from Auntie Mame, because he’d found it there, too. He had no idea whether saltpeter did what people claimed it did. A moment later, she said, “Really?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out,” he answered.

  He managed it, too. That surprised him almost as much as it delighted him, at least until Anna said, “Once we’re married, you’d better not go away for months at a time. I’m not sure I’d live through the reunions.”

  Thanks a lot. Jerry got just enough of where she was coming from to keep from saying it out loud. Fighting at reunions wasn’t in the recipe for happiness, either; he could see that. They weren’t always in perfect rhythm about what went on in the bedroom. He kept hoping more time together would get them better synched.

  She asked, “So what did you actually do while you were out in the middle of the Pacific for four years?”

  Lying at a loving reunion wasn’t a great plan, either. He knew that. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t believe the truth; she read science fiction and fantasy, too. But telling her the truth would put her in the same kind of danger he’d put himself in when he smuggled those two photos out of the Special Measurements container. He was willing to take his own chances. He didn’t want her to have to.

  Then what about Tim? he asked himself. That somehow felt different. The difference between a loved one and a friend? Between a woman and a man? Maybe he just thought Tim was better at taking care of himself.

  “Hello?” Anna said. “Did all your brains fall out that time?”

  “Felt like it,” Jerry answered with dignity, wishing she were as happily torpid as he was. He went on, “I really didn’t do a whole lot. I was one more research project on a research ship. Engine noise and things kept me from getting the kind of data I wanted. But I sure got the kind of money I wanted.”

  “That was good,” she agreed. “Seems almost like they wanted you more for cover than for what you could really do, though.”

  No, she didn’t have a college degree. Yes, she was plenty smart anyhow: more than smart enough to see the obvious. “Next time you’re at my place, I’ll show you a manganese nodule,” he said. “I’ve got one in my suitcase, maybe the size of a golf ball. We all do—souvenirs, you know. They came in the sludge along with the bigger ones the mining unit was really after. I don’t know how much money the Hughes people spent on the project and on security, but having me along was chump change to them. Less than chump change.”

  As with Tim before, except for tagging Howard Hughes instead of the CIA, he wasn’t even lying. And Hughes made perfect camouflage for the Agency. Anna proved it: “He’s nuttier than a Mission Pak fruitcake. He has been for years. Everybody knows that.”

  “Hey, I’m not gonna argue with you, babe. He threw money at me when he didn’t have to. If that doesn’t make him crazy, what would?” Jerry said.

  “Good point,” she said, puncturing him and getting the last word at the same time. If only she didn’t sound so much as if she meant it …

  He’d intended to spend the night at her place. He liked sleeping with her, even when it was only sleeping. He put up with sleeping with the King of Siam, who sometimes decided an exposed ear was something that needed killing. Now he decided going back to his apartment made a better idea. Assuming he was entitled to stay was liable to piss her off.

  She didn’t ask what he was up to or tell him to stop when he began getting dressed. That made him figure he was probably doing the right thing. She needed to get used to his being around again, too. “We’re both still getting our act back together,” he said.

  “And getting our act together back,” she said, which also wasn’t wrong.

  From her place to his wasn’t more than five minutes. He thought hard all the way down 139th Street. Everything would be fine for a while. He’d lifted the photo of Humpty Dumpty and the one of the aliens inside from the middle of sequences of similar pictures. Nobody would notice they were missing right away. You’d need to count the prints or compare them one by one with the negatives before you’d realize a couple had walked with Jesus.

  Not with Jesus, Jerry thought as he pulled into his building’s driveway. I’m only a distant, distant cousin. He was smiling when the security gate swung up to let him in, but not by the time he got out of his car.

  * * *

  Jerry dialed the number his old house had used since he was eight years old. They called it a three-two number now, not a DAvis number, but it was still the same number no matter what they called it. The phone rang twice. Then his father picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dad. It’s me.”

  “Oh, hi, Jerry,” Hyman Stieglitz said, as if the call were a surprise. Then he got himself back in gear. “Where do you want to go tonight? The Tijuana Inn okay?”

  “Anna and I had Mexican food last night,” Jerry said.

  “Did you? All right. How’s Helen Yee’s sound, then?”

  “That’d be great,” Jerry said. When he was a kid, Gardena had boasted only two Chinese restaurants. Helen Yee’s was the good one. There were more Chinese places around now, and it seemed kind of old-fashioned, because it hadn’t changed a bit. But the food was still tasty. “What time?”

  “Six o’clock work for you?”

  “How about a quarter to?” Jerry said. If his father went along with that, he ought to be there by six straight up.

  “Fine,” his dad said. “See you then.” He hung up. So did Jerry.

  Helen Yee’s actually worked out pretty well. It was on Rosecrans a little west of Western, about halfway between the house where Jerry’s father still lived and his apartment. The lot just east of the restaurant had always intrigued him. For as long as he could remember, it had held a Quonset hut like the ones on Midway, what he thought were drop tanks, and other war-surplus junk.

  He pulled into the parking lot right at five forty-five. One glance told him his father’s big Olds wasn’t there yet. He walked into the restaurant. He was enough of a regular that the woman behind the register smiled at him and said, “Hello! You aren’t here with your lady friend?”

  “Not today. My dad and I are having dinner.”

  “Ah. Table for two anyway, then.” She plucked menus from a stack and led him to one. The place wasn’t crowded. A waiter brought a pot of smoky tea and two small, handleless cups.

  Hyman Stieglitz strode in at two minutes to six. For him, that was making good time. Jerry waved. His father came over. They shook hands. “How you doing, kiddo?” his father asked, as if he were still nine.

  “I’m okay. Still don’t know what time zone I ought to be in, but I’ll get over that. How are you?” Jerry asked the last question with some concern. Not having seen his dad in a while reminded him the old man was, well, old. He looked weary. And his clothes and probably his skin carried the ingrained stink of a million cigarettes. Smokers didn’t know they smelled bad, but everybody else did.

  “I’m fine,” he said as he sat down. He put on a pair of reading glasses for the menu. Laughing sourly as he did it, he added, “Time’s a real son of a gun, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Jerry nodded. Being on the Glomar Explorer with the old guys had rubbed his nose in that. So had Bob the engineer, who’d dropped dead after hustling to catch his plane home.

  His father snorted. “Fat lot you know about it. When I was your age, I was in a foxhole somewhere between Rome and Milan, and the Germans were throwing mortar bombs at me.”

  “Yeah,” Jerry said again, and then, “You don’t usually talk about the war.”

  “Not a lot to talk about. I didn’t want to be there. Nobody wanted to be there, not even the Krauts. I mean, they needed beating, God knows, but it wasn’t fun or anything. People who’re happy because they fought in it, those stupid mamzrim, don’t remember what it was like. Nobody who ever smelled a dead body’s got any business being proud of making like a soldier.”

  That was more than he’d said about World War II than any other time Jerry could recall. It also reminded him of how veterans his age talked about Vietnam. Before Jerry could ask him to go on, the waiter came by to take their orders. They both chose the number two dinner. The waiter scribbled on a notepad and went back to the kitchen.

  Hyman Stieglitz sipped tea and looked down at his hands. He seemed as surprised he’d opened up a little as Jerry was. After a moment, he asked, “What was it like while you were on the ship?”

  “Like a hotel, more than anything else. Hughes has more money than they know what to do with,” Jerry answered—once more, the truth, as long as you substituted the Glomar Explorer’s actual owners for the ones it belonged to on paper. He tried to steer his father back to the days before he’d been born: “What was the ship you crossed the Atlantic in like?”

  “Horrible scow. Liberty ship. Couldn’t make ten knots if you threw it off a cliff.” Plainly, his dad didn’t have fond memories. “Bunks four and five high, maybe eighteen inches between them. Crappy food. Nobody wanted to eat anyway, ’cause it smelled like puke all the time—the ocean was rough and we got seasick. The heads … You don’t even want to think about the heads.” He paused. “Let’s not talk about that. Here come the soup and the appetizers. How can you enjoy appetizers with no appetite?”

  The soup was egg drop, something Jerry only had at Chinese restaurants. The spoons were similarly distinctive. The first mouthful took him back in time. He’d loved egg drop soup when he was little, and he still did. The appetizer platter hadn’t changed, either. Fried shrimp with the batter curled around to make them circles. Pork ribs in a sweet-and-sour glaze. Foil-wrapped chicken, his least favorite part of the platter. Egg rolls. Egg foo young.

  “I hope this place is still here when your kids can enjoy it,” his father said.

  “That would be good,” Jerry answered, though Anna was dubious about children. He was dubious about them himself; he didn’t think he’d make a great dad. He added, “We’ve got a new wedding date—the twenty-fourth of November.”

  “I was going to play golf that day,” his father said, so straight-faced that Jerry believed him for a moment. Hyman Stieglitz smiled crookedly; he knew he’d scored a hit.

  You got beef with broccoli and exotic, steaky mushrooms, along with chicken fried rice and shrimp chow mein. The shrimp there were much smaller than the ones that glorified the appetizer platter. A bowl of fried noodles let you soak up sauces or just eat something crunchy if you felt like that. Jerry’d always pigged out on them when he was little. Now he made sure he cleaned his plate first.

  “I’ll bring dessert in one minute,” the waiter said as he put dirty dishes on a tray. Jerry nodded. His father lit a cigarette. He always did right after dinner. A couple of other people in the restaurant were smoking, too. Jerry thought it was gross, but what could you do?

  The waiter came back with a little lacquerware tray that held fortune cookies, almond cookies, and the bill. Hyman Stieglitz took that. “Hey, I was gonna pay,” Jerry said. “I’ve even got money for a change.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not broke.” His father opened his fortune cookie. “Good luck is heading your way. That’d be nice. What’s yours say?”

  Jerry cracked his cookie, too. “You will succeed despite difficulties. How does it know I’m in grad school?”

  “Magic. Ancient Chinese magic, probably from a cookie factory in Oxnard.” Jerry’d lived with his father till he got his bachelor’s degree. Since then, he’d tried to forget how much of the way he thought came from his old man.

  His father put a ten, a one, and a couple of quarters on the tray. As they walked out together, Jerry said, “Thanks, Dad. You really didn’t have to do that.”

  “I know. I wanted to, though. What are those difficulties you’ll succeed in spite of?”

  What would he do if I told him? Jerry asked himself, and immediately answered his own question: He’d land in the CIA’s crosshairs, too, that’s what. Tim was now, no matter how much Jerry didn’t like it. Three men may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. If he knew what Benjamin Franklin had said, so would the Agency.